The stakeholder lead of Teagasc’s water quality improvement campaign has claimed that farmers who flout the rules in place to safeguarding watercourses from pollution no longer garner any sympathy from their farmer colleagues or the wider agri-food industry.

FBD Holdings plc’s chair Jim Bergin chairs the stakeholder steering group of Teagasc’s Better Farming for Water campaign with both roles assumed after he stepped aside as Tirlán’s CEO.

Speaking in Grange at the launch of a River Boyne catchment management plan, Bergin praised farmers’ recent progress on water quality, stating that “farmers have been incredible in adapting to change”.

ADVERTISEMENT

However, his remarks also hit out at the minority of non-compliant farmers who put at risk the reputations of their neighbours and the farming sector as a whole.

“I would also observe and we know this to be true that the tide is turning culturally on non-compliance,” Bergin said last week.

“There was a time when if someone was breaking the rules, you would hear ‘so-and-so cute man was out spreading during the closed period’ or whatever.”

'Peer pressure'

The FBD Holdings plc chair likened the peer pressure to push to the last few non-compliant farmers into adhering to water quality rules to the drive to get dairy farmers to sign up to Bord Bia’s Sustainable Dairy Assurance Scheme (SDAS) just over a decade ago.

“I remember back we were doing SDAS and SDAS was very difficult to get in back in 2012, 2013 and 2014,” Bergin continued.

“We got to a point where many, many people were bought into it and then for the people who weren’t, there was absolutely no sympathy.

“There is no sympathy for breaking the rules now. Whoever is breaking the rules is damaging our reputation and putting our industry at risk.

“That moral pressure is building and is there and we have to continue with that and the farming organisations have done a great job at leading in that and rolling it out.”